Pen-ts’ao kang

The earliest official recommendation of this remedy which Alexander Tschirch was able to find was in the eighth edition of the Augustana Pharmacopoeia of 1623 (104). The Chinese scholar Li Shi Chen, author of a famous pharmacopoeia (the Pen Ts ao Kang Mu, sixteenth century A.D.), prescribed as a remedy for goiter a wine made from sea plants (105). In 1769 Dr. Russel recommended vegetable ethiops (charcoal made by burning fucoid seaweeds) for the same purpose (13). 

Signor Marcello Muccioli published in Archeion an article on the knowledge of arsenic possessed by the Chinese in about 1600, as exhibited in the Pen Ts ao Kan-Mu (or Kang-mu), a 52-volume encyclopedia on materia medica (37). Yoshio Mikami states that this work... 

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